Cooking prep: January 3, 2011

I have this weird thing where I love to cook, and I like to eat, but I don't like to do the two together! This is why I do so much food preparation ahead of time. Today:

Vegetarian chili. This is an excellent recipe, very delicious! It does, however, require quite a bit of vegetable chopping:

Six servings of chili vacuum sealed and frozen.

Chicken paprika. I made one serving of this ahead of time, which was a first. I reheated the chicken in the sous vide at 160°F for 30 minutes and reheated the sour cream sauce on the stove and it worked very well!

Chicken Parmesan.

A lot of the time I break down a whole chicken, or I buy local Misty Knoll chicken. Or get chicken in my CSA,

But today, there was no chicken breast at the Coop! I bought a package a Purdue "Naturals" antibiotic-free chicken breasts at the regular supermarket. I scaled out the half breasts and they were 9.1 oz.!

A reasonable portion of meat is 3.0 oz., but I'm not entirely reasonable and often a meat-centric meal that I make might be 5.0 or even 6.0 oz. of meat. But 9.1? That's excessive!

I divided up the 1.8 lb. package of chicken breast into four servings and froze two.